Building Upway’s Venice Beach Pop-Up: Behind the Scenes

Written by: Alice Lagarde | April 4, 2025 | Time to read 5 min

All the ingredients of a great party: local community and good times, all without breaking the bank. Here’s how we built Upway’s Venice Beach pop-up event!

More about the Author: Alice Lagarde, Marketing Manager, Upway

Alice Lagarde is a French wanderlust with an eye for aesthetics. When she’s not capturing the perfect shot for Upway, you can find her globe-trotting, soaking in new cultures, and finding inspiration in the new trendy coffee places. A lover of adventure and all things beautiful.

E-Bike drive thru event Upway Venice Beach

Upway is Los Angeles’ newest neighbor, having just launched our UpCenter in Redondo Beach, so it was time to introduce ourselves to the community. I took the reins to prepare the exciting pop-up event as part of Upway’s rollout on the West Coast. Here’s a behind-the-scenes look at our recent event at Venice Beach!

Table of Contents

Introduction

Community-building in Los Angeles

Creating the event from scratch

Pop-up event: Bike “Drive-Thru”

What worked & what we learned

Final Thoughts

Community-building in Los Angeles

The impetus for this Upway event in Los Angeles was simple: to create engagement with the local Venice community. And this is no small task considering that Upway is a French brand operating in the relatively niche second-hand e-Bike market.

Upway has strong brand recognition in Europe but we are still very new and lesser known in the US market as our presence continues to grow after launching the LA UpCenter. So the challenge here was twofold: engaging the local community and building brand awareness in a way that felt authentic.

For those reasons, we decided to pursue a street marketing campaign directly in the heart of the community. We wanted to be right where the riders are, making it easy and natural for them to engage with us.

But another big challenge was the budget. Having just launched our operations in Los Angeles, we had limited resources, meaning we couldn’t rely on a big agency to set up a full-scale and high-production event. As a solution, we built all the materials in-house, keeping it lean and efficient while still captivating the community with the Upway story.

Creating the event from scratch

The first step was finding the right location and partners to bring the local event to life. Our initial idea was to set up directly on the beach, either in nearby Manhattan Beach or Venice Beach. However, permit requirements made this option significantly more complicated.

In response, we pivoted to partnering with a local business to host the event. This way, we could tap into their community while securing a prime location without the hassle of permits.

We discovered Anomaly Coffee on Instagram, a well-known barista in Los Angeles who collaborates with many outdoor and lifestyle brands. Anomaly Coffee was immediately on board, and through them, we also connected with Lavender & Truffle, a local ice cream boutique in Venice. These partnerships gave us a great mix of community-driven engagement and goodies: coffee, ice cream, music, and a high-traffic area in the heart of Venice Beach, a hotspot for local cyclists and boardwalk-goers.

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Pop-up event: Bike “Drive-Thru”

Upway mechanic during e-Bike drive thru event

With the location and partners settled, we moved to designing the actual event experience. We decided to design a drive-thru experience adapted for cyclists, working with local suppliers and sticking to the modest budget. Riders could roll up with their bikes and receive a free 10-minute repair from our professional Upway mechanics, a great way to offer real value while introducing people to Upway’s expertise.

We also created:

A giveaway wheel where people could spin to win an amazing Blix Sol Eclipse Cruiser worth $1,899! Visitors could also test-ride the e-Bike on the beach.
A full-scale street setup with signage and other materials. We rented a van and moved everything ourselves to Venice Beach the night before the event.
We also invited various influencers to the pop-up so they could relay the news to their local communities and get to know the Upway team.

What worked & what we learned

The event was a great success— we had positive engagement with the local community, especially through our collaboration with Venice Electric Parade, a group that organizes night rides with LED-lit bikes. People loved the free repairs, and we had many meaningful conversations about Upway and the benefits of refurbished e-Bikes.

Biggest learnings

Most riders came with standard bikes rather than e-Bikes, so next time, we want to encourage e-Bike test rides to show people the benefits of electric bikes, from hybrid models to road e-Bikes and more.

Always ask something in return. People respond well to simple requests like following social media channels or signing up for newsletters, especially when offering a free, quality service that will attract a lot of people.

Ensure a high-traffic location to reach as many people as possible. Although the Venice Beach location was great, we could choose an even better position next to a bike path for future events.

Event production value wasn’t the highest, which made sense considering we operated on a lower budget and didn’t work with an event agency. For example, the letter E on a sign flew away, but it wasn’t the end of the world, of course.

Upway team during Venice Beach pop up event coffee shop

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Final Thoughts

The Venice Beach Bike Drive-Thur showed us that you don’t need a huge budget to create an amazing impact, just the right partners, location, and hands-on execution. The next step for Upway’s Los Angeles team will be to organize a community bike ride in LA, specifically designed to get people into the saddle of e-Bikes and encourage them to discover the benefits.

Check our e-Bikes

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LA Launch and Why It Matters: My Reflections on the California UpCenter

Finally Here: California E-Bike Incentive Program

Building Upway’s Venice Beach Pop-Up: Behind the Scenes

Community-building in Los Angeles

Creating the event from scratch

Pop-up event: Bike “Drive-Thru”